Toronto native advertising technology company StackAdapt has found a new niche for itself as a programmatic demand-side platform focused on in-stream advertising at scale.
The company launched in late 2013 with a combined offering for native ad buyers and sellers. It offered publisher tools for native ad design and a dedicated native ad exchange, as well as a bidder for advertisers and agencies to programmatically buy ads. By spring 2014, it had onboarded some 3,000 publishers in the U.S. and Canada.
At the time, co-founder Ildar Shar said the company decided to build its own publisher toolset since there weren’t many platforms with the capabilities available. But since then, the market for native has grown exponentially, with dozens of new companies dedicated to creating publisher tools and native ad exchanges.
But Vitaly Pecherskiy, StackAdapt’s founder, COO and until recently vice-president of publisher relations, said it’s now time to home in on the aspect of the business it’s best at — programmatic buying.
To that end, StackAdapt is shutting down its publisher network. Existing publisher users are being migrated to a handful of dedicated supply-side partners including AdsNative, Pubmatic, DistroScale* and PubNative, which offer their own exchanges and native publishing tools.
StackAdapt buyers will still be able to access all the same Canadian and U.S. inventory, but they’ll also have a lot more options.
“Through these integrations, we’ve exponentially increased our reach and number of impressions in Canada,” he said. “Just beginning in 2015, we increased our scale in Canada by six times, and it’s been primarily through these integrations.”
He compared the move to Casale Media’s rebrand as Index Exchange earlier this year, in which it attempted to clarify and differentiate its role in the programmatic ecosystem, as well as distance itself from its former life as a managed network. He said StackAdapt wants to position itself as a 100% programmatic technology company on the buy-side, rather than a middleman network or media player.
Focused on in-stream content distribution
Although StackAdapt initially offered the option to have native content hosted on publishers’ sites, that will not initially be available through its programmatic partners. Instead, StackAdapt will focus on in-stream ads (text and display units that live inside the main content feed on a publisher’s site or app, but link out to the advertiser’s site) rather than more high-touch custom content executions.
“We see a lot of brands want to own this content and actually have it on their properties,” Pecherskiy said. “They’d much rather have users come to their site, engage with their content and then continue browsing on the site.”
He said that “native” doesn’t necessarily define where an ad is displayed or where content is hosted. What makes an ad “native” is that it connects the reader to content created by or for the brand, rather than to products, offers or landing pages, as is common with banners.
“We actively discourage advertisers from promoting anything but content,” he said. “We see premium publishers demanding full transparency on advertisers that run on their properties and they are very strict with what is promoted through native. Most of them would never allow anything but great branded content promoted through it.”
He said programmatic native is best seen as “a channel for branded content amplification.”
*Note: An Ad-vantage story that ran last week stated that the Real Content Network would have exclusive access to DistroScale’s Canadian supply. This was incorrect; DistroScale has relationships with other buying platforms in Canada, including StackAdapt. The previous story has been updated.
